A good, solid, varied campaign, going from rail shooting to tank control to contesting points through to stealth. I think it takes you through pretty much everything you'd need to be able to handle the major points of multiplayer. Shooting in a Battlefield game remains as fun as ever and the weaponry isn't as much of a restricting factor as you'd think for the era - the only exception being the fact that with one exception there is no real way to kill someone remotely without making a loud noise. My only issue would be the usual with BF - sometimes checkpoints are a bit far apart.

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2) Gears of War 4 - PC

Very good campaign. Gears was always at its worst when it was taking itself too seriously so having the main characters a bit more aware that people with no necks chainsawing monsters in half is not terribly realistic works a lot better. PC port works well, too - being able to aim with a mouse makes the enemy feel a lot less bullet-spongy to me than the 360 games, massively speeding up what felt a bit stodgy before.

Enjoyed this a lot. Dungeon crawler with frantic, touch screen combat and an art style that I'd have to describe as Mexican psychedelia. I know it supposedly underwent a prolonged, troubled development, but it doesn't show any signs of that when you play it. Could have done with some more enemy types, but I'm not sure what else they could have done within the limitations of a real-time screen-swiping combat system.

Decided to put in a new, patented "satisfaction factor" into my list this time around.

1) Battlefield 1 - PC - 4/5

2) Gears of War 4 - PC - 4/5

3) Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - PC - 3/5

Not bad. I like the little quick missions that you do to unlock stuff. Lots of little niggles and weird decisions that bring it down though.

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4) Plants vs Zombies 2: Garden Warfare 2 - PC - 3/5

Was a lot of fun til about 2/3 the way through and then the AI just couldn't keep up. The game structure feels a bit too randomised and free to play for a game which is supposed to be something you buy, too. At the price of "part of Origin Access" it's fine.

It's frustrating that this should be so much worse than Guardian Heroes with the main planner being the same guy responsible for it. I'm not convinced there's any sense of balance, the levels are insanely short (so you end up talking more than fighting, even in a 3 hour game) and there's only 1 campaign - turns out that you get the achievement for clearing the game with each character just by playing the very last level, which has no fighting in it anyway! Extra marks for the completely insane interface where they literally have you hitting F5 to cycle through display modes to show the (minimal) stuff on the 3DS version's second screen.

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9) Ratchet and Clank - PS4 - 3/5

Good shooting with some super fun weapons. Looks fantastic with hundreds of bolts and shots flying around during hectic fights. Those Clank sections, though... I'm hoping they make another as I think with a development schedule not based around a film they could really nail it. Though Sunset Overdrive was one more iteration away from being really good, and I'd prefer another of them, I think.

Not quite! I was disappointed looking back at last year with how few games I actually finished so I have been digging through and going back to stuff. Helps that I've been making an effort to put a game on instead of time that I'd otherwise spend messing around on the internet.

Being able to free up the insane amounts of space used by games like Forza and Gears is a good motivator, my game SSD is "only" a terabyte...

I think I'll be slowing down a bit from now but that all depends on what comes up next. Thinking of trying to work through the Sanada spinoff from Samurai Warriors as I've got a lot of podcasts to catch up on. Currently on Granblue on my commute just so I can get through more and I want to get back to SaGa, which is one of the most interesting games I've played in a long while.

Personally I enjoyed mopping up the endings and doing a few quests to finish it off and since you only have to play half the game and the enemies don't scale with your character levelling up. So you can pretty much one shot most of the bosses, which makes it quite quick to finish off.

It's still based on the SM4 engine which is fun enough but there are too many faults to recommend. Firstly, there are far too many instant loss conditions around the middle of the game which results in something often infuriating to play (I literally got spotted by an enemy that warped in from somewhere else at one point, instantly failing the mission I was on). Secondly, there's too much bumph in there - bits where you walk 15 seconds to another cutscene, short bits of text to bridge cutscenes, having to go back to town to increase your level cap, stuff like that, and that's not even including the fact that about 50% of the battles feel like filler.

Most of all, though, the story and characters just didn't do it for me. I think it's clear it's not written for me as a non-Japanese man; the story of Yukimura Sanada is one which I realise is important to anyone who wishes to understand the Japanese character, it's still not one I enjoy. It isn't helped here by the fact that Yukimura as a character is still incredibly boring and passive in everything he does - which I assume is part of his appeal to the sizeable female audience of the Musou games (the same applies to Zhou Yu in the Three Kingdoms games). Where this game goes even further off-course for me is the way the relationship between Yukimura and Chacha (culminating in the story's end), as well as the way Sasuke is included.

One other thing - if this and the latest Atelier are indications of how Kocmo are going to use PS4 Pro hardware then I think I'll be starting to mess around with my display settings for their games in future. It uses an extremely ugly reprojection method to make it look kind of like 4K, except there are miscoloured pixels, dot crawling and the like all over the place. It's extremely ugly and seriously harms the framerate. You might ask why I'm looking at individual dots; to that I say "why the fuck else would I have bought a TV that can display them?"

You know what? I liked this quite a lot. Sure, it feels low budget a lot of the time but the people who made the game did well in not trying to over stretch themselves. Instead they created something that works for the relatively short (by modern JRPG standards) 20 hour story. They have a good stab at making every area have its own little story; they don't quite get there but it's close enough. Actually, I think that covers most of the game. I enjoyed the battle system too - though I was able to trivialise standard encounters pretty easily the boss fights were well balanced and exciting to the end. Good stuff, and I'm looking forward to seeing what comes from Tokyo RPG Factory next.

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12) Dragon Quest Heroes 2 - PS4 - 4/5

Not sure why I left this so long, I was right at the end as it turns out. Really good sequel, fixes most of the problems from the first game. The only real issue I have with it is that the player characters' attacks don't feel like they do enough damage for the most part. The personality and variety makes up for it, though.

Just great stuff. Not the longest game ever made, but clearly designed to within an inch of its life. Barring the (short) cutscenes lacking a skip function, there's really hardly an idle second in there. The map isn't quite as clever as Xanadu Next though!

A succession of 'bits of business'. A few made me laugh, a few more took me by surprise. In spite of the number, it's short enough that it's worth playing and finding out for yourself but the hit rate was a bit low for me.

15) Hard Reset Redux - PC - 3/5

Not bad. Didn't have much of a 'feel' to it though - felt very flyaway with little impact. Weapons felt very inconsistent and swapping was a fiddle. Some good ideas in it though, and though it generally petered out there was a fun encounter in a factory.

16) Marlow Briggs - PC - 3/5

Fun little God of War clone. Marlow's much easier to get on with than Kratos ever was, though there's a lot of glitchiness in there. My controller would often just start vibrating and never stop for a while. Some fun little minigames in there too - they keep it varied enough over the 5-6 hours.

17) The Room Two - iPad - 4/5

Great but short adventure. Properly takes advantage of the touch screen for some excellent item manipulation. Like the first, my problems remain that the game itself is only a few hours long, and that sometimes it's a little too eager to reveal hints.

I'm still going - in case it wasn't clear by now, I've decided to beat at least as many games in January as I did all of last year. Getting there...

1) Battlefield 1 - PC - 4/5

2) Gears of War 4 - PC - 4/5

3) Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare - PC - 3/5

4) Plants vs Zombies 2: Garden Warfare 2 - PC - 3/5

5) Job Simulator - PS4 - 1/5

6) Forza Horizon 3 - PC - 3/5

7) Xanadu Next - PC - 4/5

8 ) Code of Princess - PC - 1/5

9) Ratchet and Clank - PS4 - 3/5

10) Sengoku Musou/Samurai Warriors: Sanadamaru - PS4 - 2/5

11) Ikenie to Yuki no Setsuna/I am Setsuna - PS4 - 4/5

12) Dragon Quest Heroes 2 - PS4 - 4/5

13) Ys: The Oath in Felghana - PC - 5/5

14) Jazzpunk - PC - 2/5

15) Hard Reset Redux - PC - 3/5

16) Marlow Briggs - PC - 3/5

17) The Room Two - iPad - 4/5

18) Driver: San Francisco - PC - 5/5

No idea why I dropped this halfway done. Fantastic fun, and a great head-on collision simulator. Firing cars at the enemy doesn't get old at all! Really liked the way it combined video with realtime graphics for the cutscene stuff too. PC version's a bit 2011 though, little bits of weirdness.

19) Strider (2014) - PC - 1/5

What an irritating game to play. Dreadful soundtrack when it remembers to play. Horrible scan line effect (?) over the screen that you can't turn off. Everything requires way too many hits. Gravity gimmick fucks with your controls. Most annoying final boss I've ever played - that includes the one at the end of Axiom Verge. And just way too easy - neither you nor your enemies do anywhere near enough damage so the whole thing is just incredibly sloppy. Thankfully over in less than 4 hours. My wrist is aching from all the rapid pressing of the attack button you have to do.